It was, if memory serves, the Louis Vuitton fashion show and I was there in my very professional capacity as a fashion writer for The Guardian newspaper. But someone caught my eye who made me feel a little less than professionally excited. I grabbed my notebook and stepped down from my third-row seat to the front row. ‘Um, Kanye West?’ ‘Yes?’ he said, looking up at me through his sunglasses. ‘Could you sign an autograph for me? It’s for my niece,’ I said, handing him my notebook. ‘Sure — what’s her name?’ ‘Uh, Hadley — that’s H, A, D, L…’ The US Vogue editor Anna Wintour, who was sitting next to West, looked up and raised a sarcastic eyebrow.

Before becoming a full-time columnist and writer I worked on the fashion desk of The Guardian for eight years, but it’s fair to say I was never anyone’s idea of a fashion editor. I don’t own a single pair of tights that is hole-free and most mornings I forget to brush my hair. Anna Wintour I am not. While my grandmother studied to be a fashion designer and always loved reading French Vogue, I did not inherit her interest, let alone her natural style. My idea of dressing cleverly was to wear a pair of turquoise shorts with a turquoise shirt at summer camp when I was 12. I thought I was stylish; I looked like Smurfette.

Then, while I was at Oxford, I won a writing prize and on the back of that an editor at The Guardian asked me to write some stories. At the time, my biggest ambition was to be a film critic, but after I graduated I swanned off to study in Paris, where you can’t walk down the street without smacking your nose against a fashion story, so I just happened to write up a few of those, including a piece on the rise of Colette, the ridiculously trendy Parisian boutique, and another on the revival of the French label Balmain. When I returned to London after my year abroad, realising I needed a job, I called up my editor at The Guardian.

‘Well, you seem to like writing about fashion,’ he mused. ‘How about if you work on the fashion desk?’ To my surprise — and to the enormous surprise of my parents — I started to love it. It was hard not to be utterly charmed by an industry that seemed to revolve around such extraordinary characters as the extravagantly behatted Isabella Blow; the deliriously camp man-mountain André Leon Talley, then US Vogue’s editor-at-large; the cartoon-in-human-form Karl Lagerfeld; and Daphne Guinness, who looked more wild-bird-of-prey than human. It was impossible to imagine how any of these people could have functioned in the world outside fashion. At first I assumed that Lagerfeld, Guinness and the rest merely dressed up for the shows. But one Sunday night I went to the Curzon cinema in Soho and there was Daphne, teetering along in McQueen heel-less high heels, a pencil skirt and Chanel jacket, black and white hair in its usual beehive — at 7pm, on Shaftesbury Avenue.

But despite slowly learning about fashion, and coming to love it, I never grasped how to play the game. My reviews of fashion shows were a bit, shall we say, blunter than the ones fashion editors tend to write — for instance, describing the outfits in one Paul Smith collection as resembling those worn by Desperate Dan, and claiming that no animals had ever died so much in vain as those in one particular Jean Paul Gaultier collection. As a result I was banned from a slew of shows, from Versace to Paul Smith, either by having PRs phone me up to tell me of the ban, or simply sniffily refusing to allow me entrance to their show. They always thought they were inflicting some terrible punishment on me. I just saw it as extra shopping time.

My regular faux pas at the shows became legendary among my colleagues. There was the party in Paris when I hung out shyly by the bar, and a bearded man who appeared to be a tramp wandered up to me. To my surprise, he was English and while we made small talk I was wondering how on earth a homeless man had got past the door. Eventually, he headed off and a friend came fluttering up to me. ‘Get you!’ she shrieked. ‘He seemed very nice,’ I shrugged. ‘Of course he’s nice — he’s Jarvis Cocker!’ But perhaps my finest hour came at a Dior show when I shouted out ‘Who let a CHILD into the Dior show?’, only for said child to turn around and show herself to be Kylie Minogue.

Then there was the shopping. Oh, the shopping! When you’re away for fashion weeks, ten weeks a year, surrounded by glamorous fashion editors, blowing hundreds of pounds in the Marni outlet store suddenly seems totally normal. Well, you’re in Milan — it would be crazy not to, right? (My bank account begged to differ.) This didn’t mean, though, that more shopping led to improved taste. I remember coming back from one typically expensive fashion week in Paris and showing my sister my new pair of pink Chanel shoes. ‘You bought those?’ she asked, horrified. ‘Who are you, Paris Hilton?’

Now that I’m off the fashion desk, I don’t miss the shows and I definitely don’t miss having to read the ridiculous press releases consisting, sometimes, of not sentences but rather randomly strung-together adjectives. But I do miss fashion; working with the industry taught me a kind of self-reliance I probably wouldn’t have gained if I’d had an office job, simply because it involved travelling around the world so much. More importantly, and somewhat ironically for a fashion job, it taught me not to judge people by their appearance; just because someone turns up to a fashion show wearing a recreation of a Japanese pagoda on their head, or is swathed in a gigantic velvet cloak, or wears heel-less high heels, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taken seriously. Life can be fun — have fun with it. And yes, I do still have that Kanye West autograph. It’s on my dressing table, right next to my pink Chanel shoes. ES

Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies by Hadley Freeman is out now (Fourth Estate, £12.99)